All your personal activities live here. LifeViewer, Productivity Super App
Plan your life at New Year’s eve, your day at dawn. Japanese proverb
Time planning is crucial as time is one of those scarce resources we need to manage well. Who wants to regret about their decisions and life style choices when it’s too late to fix?
LifeViewer became available to download from Apple Store in November 2019.The app became #1 Product of the Day on Product Hunt with 562 upvotes as of today. In this article I’ll review the app and it’s main idea and introduce team behind the product. Enjoy!
We all have and use note taking apps, many write to do lists, set reminders, meditate, keep diaries, share shopping lists with loved ones, cultivate healthy habits. Those products are great, but is it really handy to have 10 different apps? Have you ever been in a situation when you decide to start meditating or saving money daily? After a couple of weeks you realise that you’ve missed a couple of days and it all breaks there — no motivation to continue the fight.
What devs at LifeViewer have done is a product that manages all aspects of your personal life in one place. You open LifeViewer to prepare a to do list and decide to meditate for 3–5 minutes. Having launched the app for one purpose I’ll complete all other tasks and activities because they are all there in one place it simply gets more difficult to miss something.
App’s navigation is built around our perception of time. There are 5 tabs: Day, Week, Month, Year, and Life. My Day being the main screen of the app has 6 square- shaped widgets:
Day Summary lets us briefly summarise what happened with you during the day: woke up in the morning, cooked breakfast, walked our dogs, went to work, had a great steak for lunch, discussed gene-editing with colleagues. If I ask you now what exactly happened 2 weeks ago on Thursday, will you be able to tell? With Day Summary widget, for sure. This tool lets you go back in time to remind of great moments and evaluate how you spend your time.
Thoughts and Ideas. Is it just me who writes down all important ideas in Notes app? Isn’t that enough? The issue with that is all notes mix up together which makes it difficult to quickly find what you are looking for, while LifeViewer has a button in this widget (same for Day Summary) to show all ideas entries, which presents all your ideas and insights in a handy way so you never forget them and can turn them into reality.
To do. The cool thing about LifeViewer’s To do widget is that undone tasks are automatically transferred to the next day. While done ones stay in the day when they became done. So if you forget to complete something today, tomorrow this task will appear on your to do list, there’s no need to create the task again.
Photo of the day. Choose a picture of the day, this will help refresh your memories in the future. Currently this widget only allows to pick one shot and no full-screen preview is available. Developers said multiple photos would be supported as well as other improvements implemented.
Schedule. Failing to plan is planning to fail. Plan your day down to a minute and always know what’s next. I normally add all my in-person meetings and calls here and add reminders 20 minutes before each event. In my opinion, interacting with others is one of the most important aspects of life, I use Schedule to manage that. This widget can be synced with Apple Calendar (Google Calendar support is in the making).
Meditation. It has been proven that practicing meditation positively affects your mood and ability to focus. Meditation widget offers a collection of ambient sounds and video wallpapers to help you relax. It has timer, which is also handy. Developers promise the next update will include usage statistics to help us track the progress. I personally would like to see more audio options as well as guided meditation programs for beginners as well as for more advanced practitioners. Would be cool to have more info about the process itself. Like how meditation works and affects our body processes in the brain.
Another cool thing about LifeViewer is Life Countdown. LifeViewer shows you the amount of time left… in your life. Scary, right? This can be motivating and depressing at the same time. Depends on what works for you. How does the app know this? Well, looks like our life expectancy seriously depends on where we live and person’s gender. Individual differences play a big role in determining this number as well, but they are much harder to take into account. This website gives us an overview of how long people live in different countries: http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/life-expectancy-by-country/. In LifeViewer your life expectancy is 80 years, I hope developers will add an option to add more information so the number is adjusted to better reflect the reality. If you switch the tab the timer shows the time left before the end of the day, week, month and year. For those users who feel uncomfortable seeing this countdown, simply go to Settings to switch it off.
Price. LifeViewer is free to use, however developers offer a subscription option to those who would like to choose different color themes and use all app’s widgets without limits. Free version allows to enter 200 characters in Day Summary and Ideas widgets, to go unlimited activate LifeViewer Pro which is 1.99 USD monthly.
Team. 2 guys are working on this. Both do design and development. Icon and illustrations were designed by their friends.
Pros. All-in-one solution for managing personal time and daily activities. No need to pay for many apps. Lots of new features released frequently. Fresh look, stylish and convenient UI
Cons. Seeing how much time you’ve got in life can be depressing for some users. Luckily, there’s an option to switch it off.
Google calendar import is not supported. Developers promise the integration will be added soon.
Due to the fact the team is frequently releasing updates I get notifications to update LifeViewer every week. This can be perceived as distracting by some users
To sum up, LifeViewer is definitely worth trying! Here is a link to Apple Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/lifeviewer-organize-your-day/id1482922018
